How to manually arrange folders in windows 7__

Anonymous
2009-10-24T14:09:18+00:00

When i try manually move one folder to be the first i can t whay

Windows for home | Previous Windows versions | Files, folders, and storage

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Anonymous
2009-10-25T13:55:54+00:00

Hello ivan099, welcome.

You can manually arrange desktop icons, however, any other icons within folders are auto-arranged and cannot be altered by direct access. You can arrange them in a multitude of different ways by right clicking open space (within a folder) and selecting Sort By > More...

A problem was discovered in Windows XP when users would accidentally manually arrange folders and icons and, in turn, they would overlap eachother. For simplicity's sake and for performance reasons, this feature was removed.

There are a number of 3rd-party programs that exist that allow you to do this, however, they would of course not be supported by Microsoft.

I would search the internet for 'File Manager', 'Alternate Shell', or something of the like. You may find some support forums that have users that specialize in just the exact thing you are looking for.

Hope this helps,

Thanks!

Ryan Thieman

Microsoft Answers Support Engineer

Visit our Microsoft Answers Feedback Forum and let us know what you think.

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  1. Anonymous
    2010-04-22T17:51:22+00:00

    Dear Ryan,

    Actually, no, this wasn't at all helpful. Let me get this straight ... Rather than engineer a fix so that icons could not be placed on top of each other, Microsoft decided to just do away with allowing users to customize their Windows experience? Microsoft might want to check out all of the very unhappy chatter on the web about this decision and come up with a patch for it pronto. This kind of lazy thinking approach to a resolving a problem is not at all what one expects from Microsoft. I'm amazed that this decision made it past the first engineering meeting.

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  2. Anonymous
    2010-03-10T03:28:30+00:00

    im having the same problem and i think it was a pathetic idea for microsoft to remove this VERY important feature. it makes me kind of hate windows 7 now :(

    please get this sorted microsoft.

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  3. Anonymous
    2010-01-17T11:54:55+00:00

    I am having the same problem, and it is a very big problem for me.  For the past 7 years, I have arranged all of my digital photos in a certain way.  I would create a folder for the new year, and then inside it I would create new month folders that also had the year, just as I say the dates.  For example, inside the "2010" folder, I just created "January 2010", "February 2010", and "March 2010".

      The computer is too stupid to realize these are dates (which it should really be able to do), and thus it always wants to put them in the wrong order.  I want to have January at the top upper left, but always had to manually drag the folder there, and place them in the correct order.  Now it appears that Microsoft took away the ability for me to place them in the correct order.

      I am very, very disappointed with this decision to take away consumer control and choice - and it is the main reason why I didn't "upgrade" our other two computers after installing Windows 7 on this one.  Although I have only dabbled with Linux before now, I think I'm going to install Ubuntu or Linux Mint, and see if they have similar limitations on users, or if they allow more freedom for their users.

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  4. Anonymous
    2009-11-08T17:15:40+00:00

    I got around it by assigning a number to each of the files in the order that I wanted them to appear in the folder.  For example, the first one has a number 1 in front of the name, the second, number 2, and so on.  It is a pain to rename all of the files, but it works to put them in the order you want.  Hope this helps.

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